Vocabulary Et Cetera
by Rachel Indeed
Summary: A collection of drabbles exploring Kara and Lee's relationship at various points throughout the series.
1. Vocabulary

Disclaimer: These characters and settings were created by Ron Moore, David Eick, and their creative team, and the Syfy Channel and others hold the rights to them. Furthermore, the first fifty sentences story I ever read was the wonderful "AlphabetisizedImprovised" by Phoebonica on this website, and I have taken the liberty of using the same random prompt words as she did.

_**Vocabulary**_

"_There's no vocabulary for…love that's lived in but not looked at, love within the light of which all else is seen..." (T.S. Eliot)_

* * *

**Summer**

In photographs, Zak held her close with warmth that never died.

**Fall**

His brother waited, crisp and cool, with downcast eyes that carried hints of riches and of shortening days.

**Honor**

He'd learned to raise those eyes to her, but after the first time, neither looked too deep.

**Fire**

Then her lover, her student, her future burnt to ash.

**Rain**

Commander Adama offered her a wealth of empty space; in his deep silence, she learned to hear the rain.

**War**

When she found out Lee was coming aboard, she prepared to fight; five hours later, she could barely remember what petty battles she'd imagined.

**Secret**

Confessing to Lee was easier than she'd expected; confessing to his father was worse than she had ever dreamed.

**Green**

Her nuggets had never experienced combat – they barely knew how to retreat – but when Hot Dog turned and opened fire, her gut reaction was pride.

**Foot**

Lee stood beside her as she levered herself out of bed, and when the toes of her injured leg brushed the floor, he flinched.

**Snakes**

It was easy to think of the Raider as an animal; she lived in a nest of Vipers that came to life beneath her hands.

**Roses**

On _Cloud Nine_, as she prowled the gardens, Lee lay back and admired her thorns.

**Pretty**

Soon enough, he found more to admire.

**Wood**

Her morning-after misery infuriated him, but even as he shouted he couldn't shake an intuitive suspicion that there was a forest here he was missing for the trees.

**Poison**

She shouldn't listen to him when he's like this, but of course she does.

**Regret**

The fresh cut on his lip marked neither the first nor the greatest of his regrets where Kara was concerned, but it still stung.

**Flying**

They were barely speaking, but it still shocked him when she jumped away; in flight, they'd never hurt each other before.

**Duty**

In the collapse of old loyalties, they answered the same call.

**Beginning**

He kissed her, but that wasn't the beginning.

**Dark**

On Kobol she savored his tiny, familiar rustlings in the night, unaware that he was listening for hers.

**Old**

The old saying that boys grew up to become their fathers and marry their mothers had always been his nightmare; braced for the wrong scenario, it took him years to notice who it was Kara resembled.

**Ugly**

It was his first thought upon seeing the _Pegasus_ – he soon discovered how right he was.

**Despair**

He knew if he stopped fighting she would die alone, and he stopped anyway.

**Drink**

"To right now," they pledged, but she guarded a past and he needed a future.

**Doors**

More than one door closed as she swung the hatch shut behind her.

**Welcome**

"Welcome back," he murmured, and for a minute she felt familiar in his arms.

**New**

Then he met Sam and the woman Kara became alongside him.

**Lost**

They were losing each other by choice, and once Lee finally got desperate enough, he pointed that out.

**Hope**

She reached for the one thing she'd _never_ allowed herself.

**Grave**

"I love you, Kara Thrace," he rasped, eyes solemn as he dipped his head in an unexpected gesture of submission.

**Taboo**

Guilt and fear hit full force with the dawn, so strong that sacrilege seemed a reasonable price for release.

**Water**

When she used the gods as a shield to cover her own ends, she expected to pay in tears.

**Winter**

As fluid filled Sam's lungs, she counted her sins and swallowed her pride.

**Strange**

After the dollhouse on New Caprica, the world was painted in different colors.

**Head**

She swung for his thrice-damned jaw and relished the loud crack as she connected.

**Apples**

Waiting at the base of her Viper's ladder, he allowed himself to notice how the cold had flushed her cheeks with red, round blooms.

**Food**

He held her while she vomited up her first food in days; the radiation had left them all so weak that she honestly misunderstood the tremors in his hands.

**Flexible**

They were both crooked, but ill-matched integrities kept jostling them out of position; neither managed to bend quite enough.

**Hollow**

"I married you because I loved you, Dee," he said.

**Bugs**

She traced the wings of the goddess and let the memory of her mother's frantic curses lift her up.

**Stable**

He sat beside her on the hangar deck exchanging rueful sorrows and felt this was the closest they had ever come to equanimity.

**Air**

The last time he'd tasted death, air had trickled gently through his fingers; this time, it crushed her plane like a battering ram.

**Light**

He gave a strangled laugh when his father first displayed the winged Aurora atop his model ship – it made for a nice sentiment, but Kara hadn't been a morning person.

**Solid**

He didn't believe his eyes until he barreled into her and the heft of her body threw him off-balance; after that, there was no going back.

**Snow**

When Leoben said "angel," she felt a seeping chill she'd forgotten since childhood.

**Metal**

Two sets of rings and tags mixed blood and metal; for years she'd gathered shrapnel, and after the mutiny she added a bullet to her collection.

**Coffee**

Lee struggled to remember the man who'd died to save his father, but he suspected, with a burst of disgust, that he'd never really looked past the thermos Jaffee carried.

**Spring**

She was the herald of change, the proof that life could be made new.

**End**

She was the harbinger of death who led them all to their end.

**Earth**

Together, they found it – twice.

**Peace**

She vanished into blue horizon, but the sky had never limited them.


	2. Request

Author's note: The remainder of the drabbles in this story were written in response to lyras's wonderful prompts at the No_Takebacks community. Many thanks for her inspiration! This one provides a missing scene from Daybreak Part Two, set just before the mission to rescue Hera gets underway.

* * *

**Request**

The hangar bay was dark and crowded. With only two hours to go before the impossible rescue began, pilots and marines were jumbled loosely into their deployment groups. Some slept in corners, limp and open-mouthed. Others were fiddling with equipment, writing letters, marking time to keep themselves from thinking. More than a few had vanished into bunk rooms and supply closets.

Kara circled the deck twice before she found him. His feet were jutting from under the wing of a Raptor and she could hear a low hiss over the scrape of metal; it sounded like he was fiddling with one of the exterior air pumps. She lowered herself to the concrete and maneuvered in beside him.

"Hey," he greeted, quirking an eyebrow.

"Hey," she answered, studying the panel he'd opened up above them. "Break your ship again?"

His defiant little "shut up" made her feel better about life. He set down his wrench and started making more delicate adjustments. "It's not broken, but the last pilots reported a bit of a starboard list during take-off and landing." He shrugged. "Might as well fix it."

She nodded and opened the lower panel. They kept their hands occupied, lying side by side, staring upward in comfortable silence.

"Blue squadron work out that stupid formation problem?" she asked.

"Yeah. I sicced Tigh on them."

She grinned. "That's cruel and unusual, Mr. Vice President."

"It's a vicious job," he said complacently.

"Did you catch up with Helo about the..."

"...countermeasures, yeah." He reached absently to one side and she slipped an insulated glove onto his hand, keeping its mate for herself. They started carefully untangling dormant wires.

"If I hadn't left, where do you think we'd be by now?"

Her question was casual, dropping cleanly into the space between them. Their fingers kept threading through the tiny gears overhead, working by touch. She didn't specify which departure she meant. It wouldn't change the answer.

"Together," he said, blinking as a drop of oil hit his forehead.

"Married?"

"Don't know." He reached for the nub of the hose, jiggling it to prevent further leaks. The corner of his mouth curled softly. "Maybe."

She huffed, sounding obscurely pleased. "Divorced, more likely."

"That's what you think."

She turned her head to look at him, cheek cold against the deck. "Ask me for something." Her eyes were warm and wide. "Whatever you want. A last request." He frowned, setting down his tools and angling slightly to face her. "Make it good," she ordered, shaking just a bit.

His eyes moved over her hands, her face; her skin gleamed blue and livid under their pool of florescent light.

They stilled and stared at each other.

"Live," he finally said. "Please, just live. No matter what."

Her eyes fluttered and her mouth drew tight.

She twined her hand in his, but didn't promise.


	3. Rebel

**Rebel**

The more she saw of Zak's brother, the more she felt she had been misled.

Lee had been a casual fixture in Zak's conversations ever since they'd started dating; always the uptight elder brother, the responsible one, the model soldier. She'd expected a bit of a cardboard cut-out, and though she refused to think too closely about that first warm night of empty bottles, the vague assumptions about him she'd absorbed through osmosis had contributed to her mistakes.

They were both far more careful now.

But every time they met she found new edges, piercing and unexpected. He was the most refreshingly competitive man she'd ever met; her sense of humor didn't embarrass him; he walked away from fights like he was carrying off some secret prize. She didn't understand him very well, but she felt like his family must understand him even less.

For some reason, she took that personally.

One night at dinner, Zak made some comment about Lee's latest wrangle with their father, and Kara couldn't entirely suppress the accusation in her tone when she muttered, "You always said _you_ were the misfit in your family."

"Oh, I am," Zak smiled. "I'm the misfit and Lee's the rebel."

"What?"

Zak toyed with his food, looking nostalgic. "I break small rules for fun. Lee'd never do that. He saves himself for the big rules, and he breaks them like it's serious business."

He set down his fork and poured himself a little wine. "Our mom drank too much when we were growing up," he said lightly, lifting his glass like a toast, "so Lee spent his teenage years _defiantly _sober. Our dad gave the military first priority, so ever since Lee enlisted he's made it a point to date attentively. Half the time I think he cares more about proving it can be done than about the girl he's with. He's kind of an idiot."

Zak shook his head. "He hasn't really got his head on straight, yet. But once he does, just watch him. He's gonna change the world." He lifted his glass again, this time tilting it toward her. "So are you."

"Oh, really?" she grinned.

"Uh-huh," Zak nodded.

"And what about you?"

"Me? I'm gonna be happy." Zak reached across the table for her hand. "And so are you." He kissed her fingers. "You'll see."


	4. One Crowded Hour

Author's note: This drabble is set during the Season Two episode, "Sacrifice."

**One Crowded Hour**

Lee had been bleeding for forty minutes now, with no medics to repair her damage. She'd told his father she didn't know how critically he'd been hit, and it was still the truth. The dispassionate, battle-ready shield around her mind had cracked the moment he'd hit the ground. She sat curled around herself, uselessly replaying the angles, but her mind was as much a traitor as her body. In her memory, the shock in his eyes blinded her to the point of impact. She couldn't see it.

The marine beside her, gasping in agony, felt as far away as Sam and Earth and the anger of this morning.

She closed her eyes, fingers bent around her clunky handset, and made herself focus on the images that panic had blanked and blurred. It was a futile gesture – remembering the wound wouldn't heal it. But she tried.

_She'd looked up, and his head had craned over his shoulder…his right shoulder. One long string of blood had drifted to the floor..._

She leaned over the side of her bench and threw up. The medics rushed her, but she hated them right now and she might have hit one. She heaved silently, blinked the sweat from her eyes and tried again, not caring who was watching.

A chest wound meant three checkpoints: heart, lungs, arteries. For almost an hour all she'd been able to see was the turn of his head and the line of his neck as he looked at her. Now the direction finally clicked. The blood was on the wrong side of his chest for the heart, the wound too near the shoulder to endanger his lungs unless the bullet had ricocheted down from his clavicle. The possibility passed through her mind, but the inside of her eyelids bloomed white, refusing to allow the image. She clung to her slender, newfound hope: he was losing blood that no tourniquet could slow, but her aim probably hadn't killed him, yet. She had struck too high and too far to the right.

Too right. Too high. She missed his heart for the same reasons every time.

She prayed she always would.


	5. Dark Matter

Author's note: In order to respond to the prompt "dark matter," I looked up its definition on Wikipedia. I have incorporated several sentences from that Wikipedia article to serve as prompts in this chapter. They are in bold, and they belong to their respective authors. I gather that the key to dark matter is that it cannot be observed directly, but its existence can be known through the attraction it exerts on galactic formations.

* * *

Dark Matter

_**As important as dark matter is believed to be in the universe, direct evidence of its existence and a concrete understanding of its nature have remained elusive. Its presence is revealed only via its attraction.**_

Kara had been Sharon's first real friend on _Galactica. _They'd come aboard only a month apart and learned the ropes together. With Starbuck, even getting lost in corridors for the fifth time could seem exciting. She had a fire inside that never quite burned out, but she'd been oddly subdued those first few months and something in Sharon's silence had attracted her.

Three weeks into the job, Sharon had botched another landing and come to Kara for advice. Her face had gone completely white, and she'd stuttered, "I can't help you." Instinctively, Sharon had caught her hand and whispered, "Hey, that's okay. It's okay."

By the time the worlds ended, they knew each other pretty well. War changed everyone, but it didn't change Kara in the ways Sharon would have expected. The constant rise and crash of adrenaline was there, of course, for all of them, bringing bad nights and drunk mornings and black-eyed exhaustion. But the battle seemed to bring healing alongside destruction – it was awakening Kara.

He was awakening Kara.

Lee Adama was hard to read, and from what Galen said he was a bit of a jerk. She hadn't seen enough to decide for herself yet, but as a first impression, he reminded her of Starbuck. They both gave off an indefinable sense of lives lived beneath the surface. But not in a creepy way; whatever they kept under wraps was good. It just wasn't something many would be allowed to see. When they looked at each other, she could tell that they weren't waiting for permission.

Sharon didn't know what Kara saw in him, but she knew it was keeping her friend alive – more alive than she'd ever been.

It was a comfort to believe in unseen beauty. Especially when every day she looked into the mirror she recognized less of her own reflection.

_**

* * *

**_

_**An important property of all dark matter is that it does not have any internal resistance.**_

"Are you very close with Lieutenant Thrace?" Roslin asked.

"I'm close with all my pilots," he said flatly.

That was the first time she realized.

She went aboard the Adamas' ship to break their hearts and their resistance. She made them face the truth, and for the sake of the fleet they found the strength to lose.

When the time came to stage her own rebellion, she turned to the girl they couldn't bear to leave behind and sent her away again. She prayed that she still had enough truth on her side to win this battle one more time. When Lee drew his sidearm and stepped alongside her, she finally felt certain she'd made the right choice. It gave her the courage to surrender.

An hour later, watching him scrub at the blood on his hands, she tried to apologize for all she'd taken from him.

"I didn't do it for you," he said, and she believed him.

When Lieutenant Thrace finally returned, she watched the first touch between them, warm and vital.

It gave her hope for the future she would never see.

* * *

_**Hot and warm dark matter moves too quickly to stay together.**_

When Kara woke him, Sam snorted in a lungful of sand and spent the next few minutes trying to stop his convulsive coughs from escalating to something worse. He was hungover and sunburned and Kara was pulling at him and she wouldn't stop talking. It was shaping up to be the worst morning since Caprica.

Then the phrase "marry me" bled through the haze, and nothing else mattered. He couldn't believe it, but he never asked questions. They stumbled down to the river and she was clutching his hand so tight it made him think this was something she actually needed. He promised her everything, not quite sure he was really awake. She looked scared, but he figured that might be a good thing. Despite the crazy rush, this was for real.

He figured they didn't need rings, but she capped that first weird week of aggressive affection with a trip to some artist friend with a set of dyes. She designed the tats herself, gorgeous arches of feather that looped into wings as they embraced.

It wasn't until much later that he realized the symbol of their marriage should not have been flight.

By the time he saw who she'd been flying from, she'd left them both behind.


End file.
